Essential Guide To Ableton Racks

Racks are one of Ableton Live's most powerful features for working with effects, plug-ins and instruments in a track's device chain. Giving you incredible control over your many devices, they both streamline your workflow and create brand new possibilities for creative sound design and mixing. Not just for placing control directly under your fingertips, racks can be used for creating dynamic performance instruments, stacked synthesizers and powerful processors.

In this course by Paul Maddox, half of duo Spektre and one of Producertech's most prolific tutors, you'll gain a complete understanding of everything racks. Beginning with an introduction to creating your own, Maddox takes a logical and thorough approach, going into depth about the intricacies of creating original instrument racks for bass and drums and efficient processing racks for vocals, drums, breakdowns and many more.

Paul has been at the forefront of hard dance consistently since he was dubbed 'one of clubland's hottest properties' at the tender age of 16. Since then, he has continued to be one of the most respected producers on the scene, going under a number of successful guises, such as Abandon, Azure, O.G.R, Barely Legal (with Guyver) and Olive Grooves, and has collaborated on dozens of all-conquering anthems with the biggest and best in hard dance music. Collaboration with Filthy Rich on their Spektre project has seen his work released on Renaissance and Umek compilations, with support from DJs such as Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin, Dubfire and James Zabiela. With a wealth of professional production and DJing experience, a passion for teaching and a highly technical knowledge of Ableton Live, Paul's courses are packed with useful tips and tricks to take your house and techno tracks to the next level.

Streamed directly from the website and with unlimited availability after purchase, the course comes with five free Live rack presets for you to use in your own productions. Check out the trailer and sample module now and take the next step to mastering racks in Ableton Live!

Sample Module

Modules

Module 1 - Intro to Racks - Macro Controls

An explanation of what racks are for and how to create a basic effects rack, including importing of effects, macro mapping and customisation.

Module 2 - More Rack Basics

Teaches some more simple techniques, in the context of useful applications, including ‘sweet-spotting’, multiple and inverse parameter mapping.

Module 3 - Chain Selection    

Shows how layers of effects chains can be switched and blended using chain selection, both within the rack and via macros.

Module 4 - Instrument Racks I

Introduces Instrument Racks, showing two examples of how they can be useful add depth and texture to sounds.

Module 5 - Instrument Racks II

Detailed explanation of the chain select area, looking at key and velocity mapping sections and showing more practical uses of each. Finishes with a demonstration of how to create MIDI effects racks.

Module 6 - Drum Racks I

Introduces Drum Racks, showing how they differ from other racks and all of the main controls, including an explanation of the pads area, sample and instrument importing and mapping of macro controls.

Module 7 - Drum Racks II

More techniques for working with Drum Racks to help improve your workflow, including copying to siblings, working with chains, choke groups, send effects and more.

Module 8 - Drum Racks III

Shows some popular uses of Drum Racks, including manual and automatic sample slicing to create unique patterns or rearrangements, and how to make a Sample Selection Rack for one pad within a drum rack, allowing multiple kicks to be imported and then auditioned using a macro control whilst a drum groove plays.

Module 9 - Parallel Processing Racks

Two lessons that show different examples of how Effect Racks can be used to add various parallel send effects layers, including one for adding spaciousness and one for beefing up drums.

Module 10 - More Advanced Effect Racks

Two further Effect Rack lessons looking at additional advanced techniques, with the first building a rack for adding evaporation-style processing, suited to breakdowns, and the second showing how to map controls deeper in more complex rack setups to macros and how to add sidechaining to effect chains.

Module 11 - Bonus Rack Modules

Some lessons that demo and explain the completed Rack Presets that come with the course.

Key Features

• Two hours of streamed tutorials
• Learn all about Live's racks
• Create instrument and processing racks
• Learn from respected producer and DJ Paul Maddox
• Five free racks included